Award-winning photographer Gregg Segal decided it was high time Americans had a visual of their waste production, so he decided to snap pictures of people in seven days of their own trash in a series titled: “7 Days of Garbage.” The photos went viral.
“I wanted to make a picture that made it impossible to ignore,” said Segal.
According to the EPA in 2012, Americans generated about 251 million tons of trash. This amounts to a quarter of the world’s waste, despite the U.S. holding less than 5% of the world’s population.
“We tend not to notice the problem because it is too big, it’s overwhelming,” said Segal.
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“A lot of people liked the teaching moment involved. Especially, the ones with children,” said Segal.
This is not the first time Segal has tackled environmental pollution in his work. In 2008, in a series called “Detritus,” Segal photographed a figure of a man made of garbage traveling around the world.
“A lot of things I do have a social value,” said Segal.
“It expose us to ourselves, to see ourselves in a light that we hadn’t considered previously.”
